Biden braces for a fundraising slowdown: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version ofFrom the Politics Deskan evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.

In today’s edition, we report on President Joe Biden taking a post-debate fundraising hit and why progressives are still backing him up. Plus, chief political analyst Chuck Todd breaks down a fundamental miscalculation the Biden campaign made about the political landscape.

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‘It’s already disastrous’: Biden campaign fundraising takes a major hit

By Natasha Korecki, Jonathan Allen and Monica Alba

President Joe Biden’s campaign has already suffered a major slowdown in donations, and officials are bracing for a seismic fundraising hit, with the fallout from a debate nearly two weeks ago taking a sizable toll on operations, according to four sources close to the re-election effort.

“It’s already disastrous,” one of the sources close to Biden’s campaign said of fundraising.

“The money has absolutely shut off,” another source said.

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Two of the sources said this month is on a path to be down by possibly half — “or much more,” one of them said — from large donors alone. Sources emphasized that the donations were down across the board.

“Donors are negative. They had a call with the president. The call seemed so contrived to people, I don’t think they buy it,” one of the people close to the campaign said, referring to a recent national fundraising call between Biden and donors. “They called on people who were the most loyal, die-hard. … There were no tough questions for the president.”

Initially after the debate, the campaign reported an uptick in donors. But that quickly fell off, according to the sources.

A Biden campaign spokesperson pushed back against the notion that fundraising was down. “That’s not accurate,” spokesperson Lauren Hitt said. “On grassroots fundraising, the first seven days of July were the best start to the month on the campaign — and many of those were first-time donors. On the high-dollar side, we’ve had folks max outsince the debate, as well.”

Hitt did not share how many donors have hit the maximum allowed under federal law since the debate.

Read more from the team →

Progressives stick with Biden as moderates voice concerns

By Sahil Kapur and Adam Wollner

Facing a heavy dose of skepticism from Democrats about whether he should stay in the race, Biden is finding support from an important faction in the party that he has sometimes clashed with: progressives.

Members of the House’s left-leaning “squad” and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., are expressing support for Biden and using the turmoil to try to nudge him closer to their economic vision for the country in the race against Donald Trump.

Sanders said, “Biden and Democrats can win this election if they address the needs of the working class.”

And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Biden should use this moment to “lean in” to a bolder economic agenda “and move further towards the working class” by “expanding his policies and vision for a second term.”

A source familiar with Ocasio-Cortez’s thinking said she’s uninterested in intraparty fighting and is trying to optimize the odds of success. The source said she’s “looking at the Dems panicking and telling them privately: Tell me who the alternative is who can beat Donald Trump.”

“She just doesn’t see that person,” the source added.

Two other “squad” members — Reps. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. — are also sticking with Biden. And Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., said she sympathizes with him, pointing to her hotly contested primary battle in August.

Biden has adopted a series of progressive ideas that enjoy broad popularity, including increasing the federal minimum wage and expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing benefits. But part of the left’s concern is that he misses opportunities to communicate that agenda — for instance, he didn’t mention either of those policies at the Atlanta debate with Trump.

Read more from Sahil →

But as progressives are providing reinforcements for Biden, the party’s more centrist and establishment-aligned members continue to express reservations.

• Rep. Pat Ryan of New York on Wednesday became the latest House Democrat to call for Biden to withdraw from the race. “Joe Biden is a patriot but is no longer the best candidate to defeat Trump,” Ryan, a moderate facing a competitive re-election race, posted on X.
• Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., stopped short of saying Biden should stay in the race in an appearance Wednesday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” She said: “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short.”
• Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado became the first Senate Democrat to publicly say Biden can’t win the election in an appearance Tuesday night on CNN, though he didn’t go as far as to say he should drop out.
• And actor George Clooney, who recently headlined a major fundraiser for Biden, called on him to end his campaign in an op-ed for The New York Times. “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” Clooney wrote. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

🗓️ Mark your calendar: NBC News anchor Lester Holt will sit down with Biden in an exclusive one-on-one interview Monday in Austin, Texas. Read more →

Biden’s struggles tie back to a basic miscalculation

By Chuck Todd

One of the correct clichés about American political campaigns is if you’re fighting the last war, you’re most likely losing.

But what if there’s disagreement over how you won (or lost) the last war?

Ultimately, one of the reasons Biden’s campaign is locked in this moment of post-debate uncertainty is his inner circle’s complete misinterpretation and misunderstanding of both the 2020 and 2022 elections, including how Biden ended up as the head of the Democratic Party. And that misunderstanding has led to a cascading series of potentially fatal positions for the party as a whole in 2024.

Biden’s great strength throughout his political career has been his ability to always be in the “mainstream” of Democratic thinking. He’s not a hard-core liberal, nor is he a closet centrist. Biden has always been “good enough” to be in the mix even without having been the first choice of any key party factions before 2020.

That also helps explain Biden’s personal animosity toward the so-called elites — or, more correctly, “the Democratic establishment” — over these last two weeks that his campaign has been in crisis.

Then along came Trump. And his approach to politics scared Democrats to the point that Biden’s standing as nobody’s last choice was a feature, not a bug, at a time when the party was looking for a standard-bearer like Goldilocks — not too left and not too right.

But let’s look back at the 2020 campaign. The primary campaign wasn’t very good for Biden, despite some attempts at revisionist history. Biden’s events before Iowa looked like previews of our Covid world. There were as many reporters as voters, all standing somewhat apart from one another; in Nevada, I distinctly remember one event where it wasn’t clear it had started, because that’s how few actual voters came for it. If there was a Biden constituency, it was sitting at home, not showing up at Biden rallies.

But Biden’s service as Obama’s vice president finally won him a constituency that ranked him first: Black voters. And then Rep. James Clyburn made the calculation that Biden was his guy, and it was enough to hand Biden not just a win but a dominant one in South Carolina. That one impressive showing — manufactured not by the campaign but by Clyburn (and, in fairness, by a courtship and familiarity with Biden the person over the years) — has fueled a fictional narrative about Biden’s being underestimated.

Read more from Chuck →

That’s all from the Politics Desk for now. If you have feedback — likes or dislikes — email us at [email protected]

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